My Mate Tried to Replace Me at His Ceremony

Marcus found me on the second day.

I heard his truck before I saw him—tires grinding over gravel, the engine cutting off too fast, like he'd been driving faster than he wanted anyone to notice. I was at the table when he knocked, grinding dried yarrow for no reason except that my hands needed something to do.

I opened the door and he stood there in the drizzle, broad-shouldered and stiff, the way he always got when Daniel sent him to do something he didn't like doing.

"Daniel wants you back at the pack house." His voice carried the flat, pressed quality of Alpha tone passed through a Beta's mouth—not his own words, just the shape Daniel had poured into him. "Tonight. To prepare the antidote."

I felt it land, the old familiar drag behind my sternum, the pull that used to buckle my knees.

It still pulled. It just didn't win anymore.

"I received the message," I said.

Marcus waited for the rest—the apology, the scramble for my shoes, the five years of muscle memory that always followed an order. When none of it came, something shifted behind his eyes. Uncertainty. Maybe the first he'd ever shown me.

"Mia." He said my name like it might work where the command hadn't. "You need to come back."

"I heard you," I said again, and closed the door.

I didn't watch him leave, but I heard the truck sit in the mud a long moment before it finally pulled away. I imagined the conversation that would follow, Marcus standing in Daniel's study with his hands behind his back. *She's refusing to comply.* I imagined Daniel's face doing the thing it did when something didn't move the way he expected—that flicker of confusion before the temper caught up to it.

Good, I thought. Let him wonder.

Word trickled to me the way it always did at the edge of territory—thin, secondhand, carried on kitchen gossip that drifted even out here. Aviana had arrived with her entourage, silk and Ironveil steel, and Daniel had walked her through the pack house himself, proud as a man showing off a house he hadn't finished paying for. He'd shown her the training grounds, the healer's wing, the herb gardens his mother used to keep before her hands got too weak to dig. He had not, apparently, shown her the basement.

Aviana had noticed. Of course she had. She struck me as the kind of woman who noticed everything that was withheld from her, the way a wolf notices the one door in a house that's been locked.

She found me herself that same afternoon.

I heard the guards before I saw her—two Ironveil wolves flanking the cabin, silent and correct, their eyes doing the slow sweep of soldiers assessing a threat that wasn't there. Aviana stepped past them into my doorway like she owned the air inside it.

She was beautiful in the way people are beautiful when they've never once doubted it. Dark hair pinned with a silver pin shaped like ivy, a coat too fine for the mud outside. Her eyes moved over me slowly—my worn cardigan, my bare feet on the cold floor, the ledger closed on the table behind me—and something in her mouth curled, satisfied, like she'd confirmed a suspicion she'd already decided was true.

"So you're the healer," she said. "The one everyone's so nervous about."

I said nothing.

She reached into her coat and pulled out a small velvet pouch, the kind used for old-world payments, and let it drop at my feet. Silver coins spilled across the dirt floor with a sound like teeth.

"Traditional payment," she said, "for the lowest Omega in the pack. I'm told that's what you are."

The insult landed exactly where she meant it to. I let it land, and let nothing show.

"You'll serve as ceremonial attendant at the Mate Ceremony," she went on, each word placed with the precision of someone laying out terms she expected no argument against. "You'll carry the tray. You'll stand on the altar stone beside me. In front of the whole pack, in front of the delegation, you'll be the first thing they see." Her smile sharpened. "The little Omega who knows her place."

I looked down at the coins scattered in the dirt. Then up, at her.

Behind my ribs, something that had been sleeping for twenty-six years shifted, very faintly, like a held breath.

The altar stone. The ritual microphone. First thing the whole pack would see.

I knelt and gathered the coins, one by one, unhurried, and closed my fist around them.

"I accept," I said.

Aviana's smile widened, certain she'd won something. She turned and left without another word, her guards falling into step behind her, satisfied with the shape of my obedience.

She never noticed that my warmth hadn't come back once, not for a second, since the moment she'd walked through my door.